Before the Egyptians understood how scarab beetles reproduced, they believed the insects were born spontaneously from the dung balls their fathers rolled across the desert. The female laid her eggs inside a sphere of dung and buried it underground, and weeks later the young beetles emerged fully formed, having eaten their way out of the ball without any visible parent to guide them. To the Egyptian mind, this was creation from nothing, life arising from dead matter without seed or womb, and it mirrored exactly what they saw each morning when the sun climbed from the eastern horizon. The sun too seemed to be born from nothing, rising out of the darkness to begin the day anew, and so the scarab and the sun became inseparable. The beetle that pushed its ball became Khepri, the god who pushed the sun disk across the sky, and the Egyptians carved his image into every temple, every tomb, and every piece of jewellery from one end of the kingdom to the other.

Khepri had no temples of his own and no priesthood dedicated solely to his name, for the Egyptians saw him as one aspect of Ra, the great sun god whose cult dominated the land. But this did not diminish his importance. In the Pyramid Texts, the earliest religious writings ever carved, his name appears alongside Ra's as the force that lifts the king's soul to the imperishable stars, and in the temples of Heliopolis, the solar metropolis where the great obelisks still stand, he was worshipped as the first light of creation itself. The saying was simple and universal: Khepri in the morning, Ra at midday, and Atum in the evening. Khepri was the dawn, the moment of becoming, the sun at the beginning of its journey. Ra was the zenith, the falcon at the height of his power, blazing down upon the earth with unblinking intensity. Atum was the sunset, the old god who entered the western horizon and sailed through the underworld in his night-bark. Together they formed a single divine life, and without Khepri there could be no Ra, and without Ra there could be no Atum.

The most dramatic account of Khepri's power appears in the Amduat, the Book of What Is in the Underworld, the guide to the sun god's nightly journey through the twelve hours of darkness. In the sixth hour of the night, the solar barque of Ra reaches the primordial waters of Nun, the dark and formless ocean from which creation first emerged, and there the corpse of Khepri lies surrounded by an enormous multi-headed serpent. The ba, the soul of Ra, descends into those waters and merges with the lifeless body of the scarab god, and from that union the morning sun is reborn. It is Khepri who dies each evening so that Ra may live, and Khepri who is resurrected each dawn so that the world may see light again. In the twelfth and final hour, the last moment before dawn, Khepri stands at the helm of the solar barque and guides it out of the underworld with the help of Shu, the god of air and winds, pushing the sun upward until it breaks the horizon and the new day begins. The Egyptians carved this scene upon the walls of royal tombs across the Valley of the Kings, a reminder that every sunrise is a resurrection and every beetle pushing its ball is a god at work.

Khepri's power over rebirth made him essential to the Egyptian understanding of death. In the Book of the Dead, the collection of spells that guided the soul through the shadowy underworld, scarab amulets were placed upon the chest of the mummy or woven into the linen wrappings, often inscribed with spells that called upon Khepri to open the heart and ensure the deceased passed the weighing of the soul against the feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and cosmic order. If the heart was heavy with sin, the monster Ammit, the devourer with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, would consume it, and the soul would be destroyed. But if the heart was light, Khepri's power would lift it to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise, and the dead would rise like the sun itself. Mummified scarab beetles have been found in graves from the Predynastic period, six thousand years ago, proof that the belief in Khepri's protective power was older than the pharaohs themselves.

The most famous physical monument to Khepri was created by Amenhotep III, the pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who ruled during Egypt's golden age and built the great temples of Luxor. At Karnak he erected a towering granite pillar topped with a colossal scarab beetle, and across the kingdom he distributed commemorative scarab seals that celebrated his own reign and his devotion to the gods. The pillar still stands beside the sacred lake at Karnak, and for centuries pilgrims walked around it in ritual circuits, believing that the god who pushed the sun could also push their prayers to the heavens. In the tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, archaeologists found a pectoral necklace adorned with three scarabs, each one pushing a miniature sun disk, the goldwork so fine that the beetles seem alive. These were not mere decorations. They were contracts with Khepri, promises that the wearer would be reborn.